Las Vegas Weekly

September 1, 2010 · 3:27 PM

The Amazing Kreskin issues a $1 million challenge in Sahara debuts

By Robin Leach

The Amazing Kreskin.

Photo: Courtesy

The Amazing Kreskin is 75 years old, but as the 20th Century’s Nostradamus, he’s not slowing down one iota! In fact, he told me with a laugh: “I’ll retire 10 days after I pass away, and that means there’s a long time to go yet.”

For six incredible decades, The Amazing Kreskin has been the world’s leading mentalist and thought reader, so much so that when he starts a 2-month run at the Sahara tonight, he’ll issue his famous $1 million challenge to assure integrity, as was shown in 2008’s The Great Buck Howard with John Malkovich that fictionalized Kreskin’s career.

At the finale to each 90-minute show at the Sahara, an audience committee will hide his paycheck, and if Kreskin fails to find where it’s hidden, he’ll lose the payday! “I’ve only ever failed nine times out of the 6,000 times since I started doing it,” he told me in an interview.

“I was in a large arena in New Zealand, which made it very difficult, and I never found the $51,000 check, so the money went to a children’s hospital there, so that was a good thing.

Photo: Courtesy

The Amazing Kreskin.

“But it’s the $1 million challenge that’s still on for the Sahara to prove I have no paid assistants, no confederates, no mechanical or electronic devices. What I do is not a gimmick, nor is it stunt magic.”

I can testify to that personally. I filmed an episode with Kreskin for my old Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. I challenged him to find where I was hidden in Manhattan. He was taken with four New York celebrities to Central Park while I hid in a rooftop sports club’s swimming pool locker rom.

There was no way he could know because I was the only one to know where I hid myself. Kreskin was squeezed in between the celebs in a limo, and he kept on giving instructions to the driver where to go, even going up a one-way street at one point. He did get to the building, but there was no elevator in the lobby to get to the roof. That was in a separate side entrance. It looked as if I’d beaten him.

He couldn’t figure out how I was on the roof, as the elevators didn’t go there. Kreskin stepped away and suddenly decided to go to the rear of the building where the elevator was. He got up to the club, declared I was in the pool and then touched me on the shoulder where I was paying a locker room staff member. Absolutely incredible! Cindy Adams of The New York Post covered the adventure from start to finish, and we remain baffled to this day.

Photo: Courtesy

The Amazing Kreskin.

I’ve had Kreskin on as my guest many times through the years on various TV programs, and he’s never failed to amaze -- living up to his name! He’s appeared on 104 shows with Regis Philbin and performed 88 times on the late Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, becoming the inspiration for the legendary Karnak The Great. Kreskin also is saluted throughout the new hit film Dinner With Schmucks starring Steve Carrell. Here are a few YouTube videos of his stunning mentalism:

“I am thrilled to come out to Las Vegas,” Kreskin told me. “I am really looking forward to the Sahara run. I used to do eight-week runs in Vegas many years ago, but with 303 appearances and 180 bookings around the world in recent years traveling 3 million miles, there’s never been time to schedule a run in Las Vegas. The Sahara originally talked about 4 months, but this September-October run will get it started, and then I’ll come out for another two months over the course of the next 12 months.

“Vegas will be a new world for me because there have been so many changes since I was last there. I’m thankful I haven’t been forgotten being away for so long, but thanks to Hulu buying 30 half-hours of my old TV series and editing them to look like new and the 200 YouTube segments, everybody young and old knows what I can do. In a sense, the Internet changed our industry and made me new all over again.”

“I’ve insisted with the new Sahara shows that there will be no boundary between me and the audience. I’ll walk over the footlights and interact with the entire audience.”

In addition to the extraordinary long-form show, Kreskin will for the first time in a casino teach separate half-hour seminars for guests to play poker and blackjack better.

“It’s the first time in my entire life that a casino has wanted me to show their guests how to better their odds and better their chance at winning. It was entirely their idea. The players will get a real shot in the arm with this,” he said. “You have so many college kids today watching poker on television, I’m certain they will want to learn how to improve their own games.

Kreskin, who is banned from playing in casinos worldwide and is photographed in the Rogues Gallery to ensure that he doesn’t play, continued: “I will help the players control their thinking while playing. I will help them relate better to people and situations around them. I’m not a gambler, but I do love to play and interact with other players.

“Once I’d just finished two weeks of TV and playing a resort in Aruba, and the night I closed, I had to kill time before a 4 a.m. departure. So I sat down and pulled out $37 to play blackjack, and by 4 a.m. it had become $22,400 for breakfast!

“There was another time when a TV show challenged me to play $500 of blackjack to see how many hands I could win before busting out. I had a run of 22 successful hands before busting. They told me I’d beaten the record of 18 straight hands, and then I remembered that was my previous record. I beat my own record!”

Among his other achievements, Kreskin accurately predicted the results of the 2008 presidential election 11 months earlier, in 2008 he predicted on live TV the exact scores of the Super Bowl three days before the game on Fox, and a month before Canada’s national election precisely predicted the prime minister’s victory and the exact amount of seats he’d carry. Acknowledging his accuracy that same day, Kreskin shocked by predicting that the new government would collapse in 14 months -- it did, and he was off by just 5 days!

Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks produced and starred in The Great Buck Howard, and at the end of the movie, The Amazing Kreskin character played by John is credited as its inspiration.

Kreskin, who starts tonight at the Sahara, summed up: “If you saw the film, you know that Malkovich reproduces my very energetic handshake with audiences at every show. He spent three days watching me at work, shaking my hand and then studied it for three days on video. Audiences are going to love the new show and classes, and I think the chiropractors of Las Vegas will love me, too, after I finish greeting all the audiences!”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

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